I can't help adoring Amazon. As a book seller, they provide an infinite selection and have always delivered my books quickly and accurately. As a technology company, they are making our life on the internet really, really fun.
I just received my Beta invitation to Amazon EC2 "Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud" and I am thrilled. "Why, why would I be thrilled about an elastic compute cloud?" I hear you scream. Because it solves a core problem for my business that is expensive, requires deep technical expertise, and is--well--not fun.
The details:
Amazon's new offering is a commodity hardware / processing service to match their commodity storage / bandwidth (Amazon S3) service. This is the death knoll for maintaining our own servers, colocation, and managed hosting. With EC2, Amazon is providing serverpower in a pay-per-use model that scales from single instances to thousands of machines.
Each server: predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth."
The cost: $.10 per instance-hour
Disk storage is provided by Amazon S3. Standard S3 storage rates apply. Transfer rates are identical to S3, except in-network EC2-EC2 or EC2-S3 transfers which are FREE.
Amazon provides a JAVA based API to create machine instances--which can be full-blown custom linux installs (they also provide default images for popular Fedora Core 3/4). From the docs (readying image, uploading to S3, registering and running):
Expect this technology to be heavily leveraged in RightCart.com in the coming months.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) goes Beta
Posted by
Jonathan Siegel
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
EC2 is indeed very intriguing! I have to admit I am disappointed at their pricing, however. At this rate it costs $72/mo for a not so hot machine, without persistent disk storage, and without bandwidth. Once you add bandwidth and storage you easily exceed the costs of a dedicated server at a decent hosting company
Compare this to S3 where you have to pay at least 2x for anything remotely similar. With EC2 there is no such 2x factor.
So the only advantage over another hosting company is that if the thing fails you have a higher chance of being able to get a new box up and running within minutes, and if your usage skyrockets it's quick to get more machines online. But we really don't know about the reliability and scalability of EC2 since Amazon doesn't reveal any details whatsoever. At this point it could well be that they have all of EC2 in a couple of racks at a single location...
BTW, more of my thoughts on EC2 on my blog at http://blog.voneicken.com
Post a Comment